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Agency Admits Fault in Death of Child

A supervisor and a caseworker for New York City’s child welfare agency have been suspended without pay for failing to adequately oversee the case of a bruised and emaciated 4-year-old girl who was found dead in her mother’s apartment in Brooklyn this month, the agency said Friday.

Admitting for the first time that there had been internal breakdowns in the case, the agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, said in a brief statement that there had been “lapses in frontline protective practice.”

The suspended workers, who had been assigned to the agency’s Brooklyn field office, came under scrutiny after agency officials investigating the girl’s death found a lack of documentation to show that the workers had made the proper number of contacts with the family.

The agency declined to provide any details about how often the workers had visited the family or what other services they had provided, except to say, in the statement, that they did not follow “standard policies and procedures.” It did not identify the workers, who were suspended last week.

The disciplinary action, which was reported on Thursday night by WNBC, came after the agency initially accused a private service provider of failing to make enough visits to the family, even though the city’s contract with the provider had ended months earlier and the agency had resumed responsibility for the case.

The agency’s missteps in the case of the girl, Marchella Pierce, who died on Sept. 2, have echoes of past failures, even though the agency instituted a series of reforms after the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown, 7.

Marchella had been in the hospital most of her life and needed the help of a breathing tube when she returned home in February. She weighed 18 pounds, less than many 1-year-olds, when the police found her dead inside her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Prosecutors have charged the girl’s mother with second-degree assault, endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful imprisonment and reckless endangerment. Ms. Brett-Pierce struck the girl with a belt and a video cassette case, according to prosecutors, and told investigators that she had tied her to a bed at night to keep her from taking food from the refrigerator and making a mess.

Investigators are awaiting further tests by the medical examiner’s office to determine the cause of the girl’s death.

The case has raised concerns among child protection advocates over the sharp decline in families’ receiving preventive services through the agency. The programs, usually assigned to outside contractors, provide counseling, drug treatment and other help to families in crisis, in an effort to keep children at home and out of the foster care system.

Marchella and her family had been assigned to one such provider in January, more than a month after the girl’s mother had given birth to a son who was found to have drugs in his system. Immediately after the girl’s death, the city’s child welfare agency said the provider, Child Development Support Corporation, had made “far less” than the two to three weekly visits that were required, which the organization disputed.

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In fact, the corporation’s contract with the city had ended in June, and the agency had taken over the case rather than assign it to another provider. In a statement on Sept. 3, the agency said its workers “visited the family throughout the summer,” an assertion that now appears to be in doubt.

The number of cases receiving preventive services has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last year, a drop of about 2,000 families and 5,000 children, according to agency figures. The agency said one reason the caseload had fallen was its provision of shorter, more-intensive programs.

But the caseload also declined as a result of a contract renewal process that was plagued with problems this spring, as the agency was planning to reduce its preventive services caseload by 3,000 families, due, in part, to budget cuts.

The City Council in June restored the financing for most of those slots, but not before many of the outside providers laid off workers or eliminated programs altogether. The agency said it had closely monitored the caseloads to ensure that families who needed services continued to get them, but several child advocacy groups across the city said otherwise.

“This was a major screw-up,” said Michael Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, an advocacy group. “It was inevitable that families were going to get lost in the shuffle.”

The city’s public advocate, Bill deBlasio, who has begun an inquiry in the case, called the drop in caseloads “startling.”

“The suspension of these workers reinforces concerns about whether A.C.S.’s handling of cases and lack of resources have left thousands of children in jeopardy,” Mr. deBlasio said Friday.

He added that the agency, responding to his inquiry, had promised to provide detailed information about the case next week.

“I hope their response will shed a lot more light on what went wrong and how many more kids could be at risk,” he said.

Al Baker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2010, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Agency Admits Errors In Death of 4-Year-Old. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe